


Diffidence

by ShippenStand



Category: Person of Interest (TV)
Genre: Character Study, Gen, M/M, Ten in Ten Challenge, Unresolved Sexual Tension
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-09-15
Updated: 2013-09-15
Packaged: 2017-12-26 02:55:12
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,816
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/960743
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ShippenStand/pseuds/ShippenStand
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>
  <i>Mr. Reese's voice had the familiar, slight strain of effort. "Not all of us can have your level of diffidence, Finch."</i>
</p><p>Harold Finch begins as one thing, and becomes something else, all due to John Reese.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Diffidence

**Author's Note:**

> For the 10 in 10 challenge, via [astolat](http://archiveofourown.org/users/astolat/pseuds/astolat). Originally written in 10 chapters, and combined now into one short story.

\--1/10--

Harold knew how this would go, but he said what Mr. Reese would expect him to say, and the admonishment against violence left his mouth without Harold truly attending to the words.

Harold heard a crunching sound in the background, and a grunt from Reese, loud in his ear, and then only breathing. No gunshots this time. Mr. Reese's voice had the familiar, slight strain of effort. "Not all of us can have your level of diffidence, Finch."

Diffidence. He embraced the word. Dictionary entries had recursive definitions. The Online Dictionary: "The quality or state of being diffident; timidity or shyness." Mirriam Webster: "The state of being diffident." The latter, without additional qualification, appeared tautological enough to amuse him, and of course it required looking up the root word, diffident, although he knew what it meant. The page read, "1) hesitant in acting or speaking through lack of self-confidence", and below that, "2) _archaic:_ distrustful." That fit. Harold did not consider himself timid or shy. Distrustful? An understatement. Self-confidence? Another matter entirely.

Harold's hesitations stemmed from prudence, a need for surety in his words and actions, to calculate the variables as far as possible when dealing with people. He memorized books on etiquette, studied forms of dress, because these served as the user interface with other humans.

\--2/10--

If Harold were to keep the metaphor of user interfaces, then he would say that once Nathan had had command-line access, and then Grace. Eventually he had left Nathan with only a shell, mocked up, to give him the illusion of access, a bitter edge of firewall between them.

For John Reese he started with a graphical user interface, giving him only what he needed until he wanted more. For all that the archaic _distrustful_ definition of diffident applied, he trusted John Reese from the beginning. He knew exactly everything about him, predicting his responses rather accurately. The problem lay in how to get Mr. Reese to trust Harold Finch. Had he given everything at once, Reese would not have believed him, and would have spent his time looking for the lies he had too many reasons to expect. If he discovered Harold through his own efforts, then Reese would trust what he knew.

The algorithm seemed simple enough. He never expected Mr. Reese to gain root access, Kasiski's Method applied to cracking Harold's password in a series of smiles, cups of tea, and heroic acts.

\--3/10--

Looking back, Harold realized that before John Reese, his inability to save the numbers had felt like the deep irritation of a difficult bug in the code, or like a hardware problem that he could not chase down. He did not think of Mr. Reese as hardware, per se--wetware for wet work, more like, and he disliked but understood the necessity for violent responses to violent people.

Even the recorded murder Harold had used to help Reese understand the work they would do had disturbed, but not truly moved him. When Reese burst through the door, Harold assumed the expression on his face came from a similar frustration, as a job he had not done to his own satisfaction. All of Reese's CIA experience would lead one to that conclusion. As the numbers came in, however, Harold saw that it ran much deeper for John Reese, that the detachment in his voice over their communication link served to cover over just how much Mr. Reese could care.

That realization did not prepare Harold for the impact of the Machine offering up the number of a baby, something he could not keep at the far end of the line, buffered by a computer, or Reese, between them. Her mother had named her Lelia, and he could not consider her a number.

\--4/10--

Harold had stopped buying his own tea. He took care to regulate his caffeine intake, and should he fail to drink what Reese offered… Well, he would not wish to insult him needlessly.

The first time the Sencha green tea appeared, in a cup style with handwriting indicating a particular vendor, he hadn't let himself smile. Mr. Reese had begun to hack his system in the way that Harold intended, so he'd given him a raised eyebrow of skeptical near-annoyance, and then looked away as he reached for the cup. He'd watched the reflection of Reese in one of the monitors, a brief flash of teeth indicating a smile, a sense of triumph, and another iteration of Harold's algorithm in getting John Reese to trust Harold Finch.

On a day when the tea did not appear, when they had no number to keep Reese in the field, but Reese did not sit in his usual chair, Harold sat back and took stock. Few of the data points ever scattered off his predicted line. He hesitated over his keyboard, and then brought up the program that tracked Reese's location by GPS. The screen remained blank, and a moment later the message, "NO SIGNAL" appeared.

He had expected it, but not this soon. He brought up security cameras near liquor stores in the neighborhoods both of the new loft and of the flop house where Reese had been living. He set the facial recognition software to have priority for processor time, and weighted it toward the cameras in the Lower East side. Within 10 minutes Harold had images of Mr. Reese, unshaven, in a flannel shirt and jeans. To Harold's slight surprise the image showed Reese entering a store near Union Square, near the loft, and leaving with a good-sized brown paper bag.

Harold checked the time stamp. It had been over 12 hours. He left the library, mildly regretting his decision to dismiss his previous driver and guards, but Mr. Reese needed to feel that his presence alone would suffice. Harold stopped at an anonymous Duane Reade pharmacy, and took the hangover supplies to Mr. Reese's new apartment.

\--5/10--

Harold hesitated at the door of the apartment, key in hand. Here, surely, diffidence applied. Reese had an incredible reaction time, even when impaired, and Harold had no wish to be killed with a shot Mr. Reese would later regret.

He stood to the side of the door, reaching over to put the key in the lock, turned it and opened the door, withdrawing his hand and calling softly, "Mr. Reese? It's Mr. Finch." He did as he had seen Reese do, moving as quickly as he could to glance through the door, and then out of the way again. He knew he would not see the bed, but he had seen an empty bottle on its side on the table, square and bearing a white, black and gold label.

"Mr. Reese," he called again, placing the paper bag from the pharmacy onto the floor and toeing it into the room. When it remained unharmed, he looked again, stepping in and peering around the door.

He saw Reese on the bed, shirtless, propped on one elbow and aiming a gun with his left hand. "Finch," he said, his voice sounding raw. Harold said nothing, but bent, carefully, to pick up the bag and carry it to the table. He took the empty bottle into the kitchen, rinsing and placing it in the recycling bins he knew were under the sink. He had ordered them placed there as he had ordered everything in the loft. He took a glass from the cabinet, where he knew it would be, filled it from the tap, and walked back to the pharmacy bag. He glanced up. The bed lay empty. As Harold predicted, Reese had disappeared the gun and taken himself into the bathroom.

Harold fished in the bag for the Alka Seltzer and dropping two into the glass, he left the citric acid and the sodium bicarbonate to react in the water, releasing carbon dioxide. He locked the door behind him.

\--6/10--

Harold listened to the voices in his ear, watched the information display on his screen, and cut smoothly in to the conversation between Mr. Reese and Detective Carter, telling them what they needed to know. He did not bother to put any urgency in his voice; the mere fact of his interruption would convey the timeliness needed. He trusted them to act, keeping an ear on each of their phones and turning back to the computer.

He had other things to do--maintenance on their aliases, for example. He had John Rooney put in a buy order for an obscure company that would soon receive a large DOD contract, made sure Harold Wren's assistant received an email from him about the Maldonado claim, and then sat up straight at Reese's voice in his ear. Their number had more at stake than they had realized. He worked for the NSA. And he wanted to find the Machine.

Harold knew, abstractly, that to know of the Machine put one in danger. He faked his death to make sure that no one would notice Grace. Losing her, even to protect her, never felt abstract, but he had chosen. He hadn't expected anyone to notice what the Machine did, much less go looking for it and put themselves in danger, all unknowing, but security through obscurity can never last.

He felt the humanity of the numbers, and when he noticed that he did not, he imagined Lelia's tiny fist to pull him back from pure abstraction. Here? For all that he learned of human behavior in order to program the Machine, for all that he could apply that knowledge in the individual case, he could not analyze his own reactions, for they came too swiftly.

He had always known the enormity of what he had built. Today he felt it. For the first time, he wondered if he had made the wrong choice.

\--7/10--

His words to Mr. Peck echoed in his head. "And if you really need a mystery, I recommend the human heart."

A decade ago he might not have argued with Root about the concept of humans as bad code. Even a year ago he might have found points where they agreed. He had once thought of hearts as calculable, at least in how they underlay action. Now he could not use the phrase 'bad code' even to refer to Root herself in her madness and her torture scenes. Her flaw ran deeper than code.

She had clearly studied the manuals, read all of the training materials for how to crack an interrogation subject, and yet she continued to fail. Code and programs and algorithms did not make life, did not make hearts.

Reese had surely read all the same manuals, but Mr. Reese would not have botched the job. His heuristics would have adapted to the situation faster and reached an effective conclusion with perhaps more blood shed. Hardware, software, yes, but Root did not understand wetware.

Harold finally did, in the moisture at the creases of John Reese's eyes.

\--8/10--

Harold realized he'd had the wrong approach to Reese. Oh, it had worked well enough, but he had made the wrong assumptions about computational hardness. Up to that moment where Harold lay on the floor of the train station, Mr. Reese bending over him with that deep and dreadful look on his face, until that moment managing Reese had seemed a matter of integer factorization, reasonable computational hardness, but not intractable.

But Reese had made a nearest vector problem fall into line, finding Root with ruthless efficiency, finding Harold. Reese would not accept the contingency plan as the most elegant solution. When Harold spoke to Peck about the mysteries of the human heart, he had spoken only of his own surprising love for Grace, but he cursed his self-centeredness. He had assumed John Reese's heart belonged to the memory of Jessica, that his dedication to the numbers came from his need to balance the scales from the weight of his CIA work and his need to do for others what he could not do for her.

Those things, perhaps, comprised part of the math, but Harold had missed a significant variable.

He had never factored himself into the equation.

\--9/10--

Harold knew about the concept of transference. He knew about the potential for intensity of emotion in closed societies, and their society was so very closed. Even when physically separated, they stayed connected through the telephone, more intimate and immediate sometimes than talking across a room.

During his recovery, he sent Mr. Reese away and hid himself in a safe house with hired security and nursing assistance. To keep Reese from worrying, he checked in twice daily, but by the third day, he sat in the raised hospital bed with a laptop, helping Reese navigate a building in search of a man who had botched the kidnapping of his own son, and now held hostage the day care teacher who had gotten in his way.

This time his admonishment against violence did not follow the rote script. Too much of his worry bled into his tones. Lelia and the boy had birthdays within weeks of each other, and the day care organized their rooms by age. "Don't worry," Mr. Reese said in his ear. "The kids are clear, and I didn't even bring a gun."

"I appreciate your… diffidence," Harold answered, knowing that the exact definition did not match his meaning.

"I wouldn't want to…" Mr. Reese began, but he interrupted himself with a grunt followed by a sound Harold can now recognize as a fist on flesh, and even after the police arrived, Reese did not finish the thought.

Harold closed his laptop and lay back, feeling the fatigue of two hours of mental exertion, of extra emotion from the added valence of children at stake. It would not have affected him so deeply before Lelia, or before his kidnapping, he admitted to himself. He had lost a layer of defense, and in this bed in his pajamas he felt timid, shy. He startled at Reese's voice in his ear.

"You all right, Finch? Need me to bring you some chicken soup?" Reese barely disguised his attempt to fish for Harold's location.

"I assure you I have excellent care," Harold deflected automatically, "and you needn't worry." But something in him warmed. Transference might go both ways.

\--10/10--

Harold knew exactly everything about John Reese, including his real name and his sexual habits. It went beyond the situational homosexuality common in the military. Reese's casual liaisons ran 64% toward male partners, but in Harold's opinion the skew stemmed more from convenience and the ability to avoid attachments. The attachment, that human need for connection, had centered on Harold himself, and to a lesser degree on Carter and even Fusco.

Harold risked no partners, and rarely wanted one. Sex, before Grace and after, seemed too messy. The world of nerds and geeks had its own code of situational homosexuality, and Harold had found the distinctions minimal enough that he did not consider either gender significantly preferable to his own hand on those rare occasions where his body made such needs known. Harold thought back on his fingers, hesitating over the keypad of the cell phone trigger of the bomb strapped to John's chest. At that moment, knowing that the odds of dying at that point came down to a simple one in three chance, he had glanced up.

Grace had never quite looked at him that way. Their love had grown in light and art, sharing joy and hope, and she had trusted him. In everything but love, he had lied to her. He had kept his promise never to lie to John Reese, and perhaps the difference lay therein. Grace had loved him deeply. John loved him completely.

It had taken Harold days to process that look, to parse out that the resignation, regret and peace in John's face reflected his feelings about Harold. He had never seen John reveal so much, and had he not known him so well, he might have missed it. And he did not school his own expression enough, so that John surely knew what Harold had seen. The moment, in a movie, would have brought a crisis and change, but it passed, and for weeks Harold kept what he knew in a compartment, watching to see if that knowledge would have any impact.

Nothing in John's demeanor or actions changed. Harold, however, found himself taking more risks, increasingly acting in the world beyond electrons, finance, and cover identities, in the world he could not control. John had root access, and had changed Harold's operating system, making him more brave and less calculating. Even so, it did not make him reckless enough to act on what he knew, to do what one might even expect within their closed society.

The word diffidence, correctly defined, applied.

**Author's Note:**

> Harold thinks in [E-prime](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E-Prime).


End file.
